The invention is directed to an approach for implementing compensation systems and interfaces related thereto.
A key challenge for modern organizations is the task of retaining the best and most talented employees. To make an organization competitive and attractive to job candidates, and/or to retain top employees, the organization must offer a competitive compensation package. The employee compensation package can be the deciding factor for many potential employees in their decision to work at one organization versus another organization.
The standard salary structure is one of the most common systems of compensation. The standard salary structure includes a base pay program that offers fixed salary ranges for each position type for employees performing the standard duties of their jobs. There may be minimum and maximum levels within those pay ranges to account for variations in experience and skill levels.
In addition to the base salary, the employee may also receive additional compensation that increases the overall compensation for the employee. Such additional compensation includes, for example, bonus payments, stock consideration, vacations and other forms of payment to the employee. Many of these forms of additional compensation are provided as part of a merit payment program based upon the employee's performance over all or part of a given compensation period.
Another type of compensation structure is the incentive-based compensation, which provides compensation to employees based upon the performance or results achieved by that employee. An example of this type of compensation includes commission based compensation. This type of compensation structure provides significant motivation for employees to produce substantial results.
A compensation tool or system may be used to manage the process of implementing and configuring employee compensations. Often, the employee compensation tool is implemented using a spreadsheet-like interface that lists the compensation values for the different employees. In operation, such a system is typically controlled by a user that manually edits values within the values of rows and columns in the spreadsheet.
Within any such compensation system, managers often need to perform “what-if” analysis while adjusting the compensation of the employees. The managers would run the what-if scenarios by manipulating compensation data for each employee, e.g., to help strike a fair balance or desired distribution among the employees. At the macro level, reports and analytics could be used to help the manager to compare the proposed compensation figures against defined targets, budgeted figures, external market data, and figures from different organizations within the company. This practice conventionally involves a two step iterative and time-consuming process. First, the manager alters the compensation figures for every employee under him and saves the data. Next, the manager then views the reports/analytics that run on the saved data to discover data inaccuracies, errors, overruns, shortfalls, and inequities. If the manager is not satisfied with the results, he returns to the first step to alter some or all of the compensation data and repeats the process.
The problem with this approach is that it is highly manual in nature, requiring a great deal of time and energy on the part of the manager to make changes to the different compensation values. In addition, if there are a large number of employees, the spreadsheet-based nature of the conventional interfaces may be come confusingly complex and cause the underlying data to become difficult for the manager to absorb.
Moreover, the conventional approaches may not allow important information to be easily accessible to the manager while he/she is performing the compensation analysis. For example, the pay structures for either salary-based or incentive-based compensation may be influenced by the compensation being paid to peers both within the same organization and at other organization in the same or similar industries/geography. Therefore, configuring the compensation package for a specific individual may require a manager to know and be able to access this type of information. However, the conventional spreadsheet interface may not be able to easily or effectively provide such information.
To address this and other problems, the present invention provides an improved approach for a compensation system and related interfaces that avoids the problems of the prior approaches. According to some embodiments, interfaces are provided that comprises multiple modes of compensation entry, in which data elements within the multiple modes are linked together in a coordinated way. Other and additional objects, features, and advantages of the invention are described in the detailed description, figures, and claims.